Ocean Wave Quilters
Quilters make quilts for all sorts of reasons. We make quilts to wrap the people we love in a warm hug. We make quilts to bring color and cheerfulness to our homes. We make quilts to satisfy our need to do something creative. We make quilts to challenge our brains to learn new patterns and techniques.
Challenges are actually a fundamental activity of most quilt guilds — a member of the guild issues a “challenge” to other members to make a particular size or color or style of quilt, or to make a quilt to fit a specific theme. Ocean Wave Quilters’ members enjoy challenges. Each year, in preparation for the Fort Bragg Quilt Show, our local fabric store, Sew ‘n Sew Fabrics & Notions, issues a challenge to make a small quilt with three specific fabrics to be used to make a quilt that matches the theme of that year’s quilt show.
This year, our theme is “Coastal Wonders,” so you can imagine the quilts that will be made! These challenge quilts will hang at Sew ‘n Sew during the month of June, and customers will be invited to vote for their favorite quilt. A prize will be awarded to the maker of the most popular quilt.
We also have an annual “Brown Bag Challenge” where members donate unwanted fabric from their stashes (those fabrics we bought on a whim and then asked ourselves, “What was I thinking?”) A committee organizes the fabrics into kits that are placed in brown lunch bags. A small snippet of each fabric is stapled to the outside of the bag — this is the only hint of what the bag contains (and often is quite misleading!) We make a quilt or other item with the contents of our bag, then display the completed items at our annual luncheon, where attendees vote on their favorite.
Another challenge that some of our quilters are currently working on is to create quilts representing approximately 30 of the iconic buildings in Mendocino Village. More on this in next month’s column.
We’ve just completed the “Tie-Dye Challenge,” issued by our member, Linda Walzer, at our monthly meeting in January of 2020. Linda brought to the meeting an assortment of tie-dye fabric panels created by her friend, Theo Wojak. Linda related that Theo was a local tie-dye artist whose work transformed everyday clothing into something special and joyful. Items he applied his talents to became conversation stoppers and conversation starters. His death in September 2019 ended his 30-plus-years engagement with the rainbow, and he went to “Tie-Dye Heaven.” But part of his colorful legacy was a set of 25”x27” dyed panels.
As a tribute to Theo, Linda asked members of the guild to create an item or items of their choice using one or more of the panels. Entries were not limited to quilts. This challenge certainly brought back memories of the 60s and 70s!
Another reason we make quilts is to be able to show them to our community. The “Tie Dye Challenge” is fulfilling many of the reasons we quilt (to be creative, to learn new techniques, and to show them to our community); the finished projects will be displayed, with several other quilts made by our members, as part of the reopening of the Fort Bragg